Uncle Pasha, now a crooked-nosed bachelor, completed his studies in Kharkov and worked for the Engineering Institute there, showing no interest in returning to live in Kiev, so he was rarely subjected to seeing his mother and sister, though he did love horsing around with me and Polya during his visits to our home. My family also tried to avoid my grandmother, but on special occasions my sister and I were shoehorned into our only starched dresses and shuttled to the Dimitrev half-home, which was twenty times the size of our communalka, plush with velvet divans and gold-tasseled curtains and vodka gleaming in crystal tumblers and excessive Frenchy foods I pretended not to prefer over the kasha and herring of home. My parents weathered these events with resignation, like patients enduring a rectal exam, and I followed suit. Of all of us, Papa suffered the most. He tolerated his mother, sister, and sister’s husband well enough, but he could hardly stand to look at his stepfather, Dimitrev senior, the man who had sent him away to the orphanage. He never forgave him for a second.
Dimitrev senior was a tall, red-faced man who had gray hair and a silver mustache though he was not very old, perhaps not yet forty, a decade younger than my grandmother, at least. He would twist the handles of his mustache around his index finger, and the more he twisted them, the longer they grew. He had a menacing twinkle in his eye that suggested he was always internally laughing at a private joke told to him by the vodka tumbler in his hand. Talk about a strong alcoholic—perhaps his proclivity was the very reason Papa and his brother were never aficionados for drink like most of their compatriots. After several generous sips of this elixir, he would pinch my father by the ear, and poor Papa would bear it, but other than that, he left him alone. He was too busy fussing over my grandmother. How he loved to tease the old woman! She spent most of our visits splayed out on the divan with the back of her hand to her forehead like some long-suffering beauty—and she might have been a beauty once, but the dead husband and endless soufflés had made her into a stout, large-nosed, dark-haired matron.
“I am exhausted!” she would declare, sighing loudly.
“My darling,” her husband would say, indicating the cooks and maids milling about. “How could you possibly be exhausted? I cannot remember the last time you lifted a finger.”
“Exactly!” she’d fire back. “Do you know how tiring it is, giving commands all day?”
My parents and I tried not to laugh at this ridiculous woman. Giving commands! What I would have given to, just once, have someone iron a shirt or do a dish or brush a hair on my head for me, instead of having to be tough like my father wanted me and my sister to be. But anyone could see that his communalka convictions had no effect on my sister. Dear spoiled Polya found nothing humorous in the exchange about our grandmother and her supposed exhaustion. In fact, she took the woman quite seriously. My sister lived for these visits to my grandmother’s home.
Darling Polya possessed the vapid beauty of a lobotomized swan. Her wild red hair coiffed about her head like the petals of a delicate flower. Her blue eyes, two shining jewels set in the center of her round, startled face, as pale as a porcelain toilet! Her lips, as lush as the banks of the Dnieper in spring. And her figure, as developed and buxom as a sixteen-year-old woman’s by her eleventh birthday. How I loathed her. Well! Like attracts like, so Babushka Tonya and Aunt Shura lavished their love on my sister, donning her with delicate garments and ivory hair clips and powdering her face until she resembled a china doll, and even, on occasion, taking her shopping.
Dimitrev senior loved flirting with my baby sister, twirling her around and inviting her to sit on his lap, though she was far too old for it. The only time I saw my parents hold hands was when Dimitrev senior planted Polya on his lap and laughed, vodka sloshing in his mustache, because Mama was telling Papa to steel himself, that making the man back off would create more trouble than it was worth. Thankfully I was spared any affection from this mustachioed man. Men had a long history of preferring my sister over me. Was I jealous at eight, nine, ten years old, angry that I was a stern, reptilian version of my sister? No, no, not at all—my stark appearance forced me to have my wits about me. Why do you think I outlived my sister by more than half a century—and counting? But I am getting ahead of myself.
During our visits, my grandmother and aunt even allowed my sister to wear a ruby necklace that belonged to my grandmother’s own grandmother, supposedly given to her by the Empress Maria herself. The rubies were shaped like enormous teardrops and were punctuated by diamonds. The necklace was such a beautiful thing that even I was not immune to it, though my pride kept me from wearing it the one time my grandmother offered it to me, which was perhaps when the gulf between her and me widened and was never again bridged.
But I could not stop staring at the beguiling and borsch-colored string of rubies around my sister’s long neck, over the years. Just once, I touched the necklace, and my grandmother slapped my hand away.
“Why, Larissa,” she said. “I did not think you cared for nice things.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“Whatever you say, dear sister,” Polina said with a sly smile that made me want to throttle her. I watched my smirking sister fluttering around with the necklace on and vowed to avenge this injustice one day. I can still feel my hand smarting from the assault.
Once my sister was adorned with the jewels, my grandmother would put on the gramophone and pull out her second most coveted item—a white boa long enough to wrap around a New Year’s tree. She would take the feathery, wild thing and drape it around Aunt Shura and Polya and herself, and the three women would begin cavorting and writhing under the feathery monstrosity like dirty boudoir girls. The women laughed, the women shrieked, they would cry out and shimmy their fingers and kick up their feet in a primitive imitation of a can-can, it was something awful. Just once, Aunt Shura asked if Mama and I would like to join and Mama lifted her hand and shook her head. “Not for us, thank you,” she said, and that was that.
During these unseemly cabarets, Dimitrev junior and my parents sullenly sipped their tea while Dimitrev senior sucked down his vodka and stared lustily at my sister and grandmother while I sat with crossed arms on the divan and counted down the minutes until the car would take us home. The worst part of it was the smug look on my sister’s face, like she belonged among those rich witches because they made her dance like a monkey and bought her dresses a few times a year. Only when I saw her with them, getting ideas about herself, did I see that Papa had a point about making us suffer in the communalka, a place designed to remind you of your place in the universe.
The dreaded boudoir boa dances stopped my twelfth year. Life is strife, as they say—in the span of two years, all the inhabitants of the shiny apartment were dead except my dear grandmother. The brothers were purged, or perhaps one was purged and the other died in a sledding accident, who can remember? As for Aunt Shura, it was cancer that did her in, or perhaps it was gangrene of the foot. What difference did it make? Dead was dead, and the living were left to figure out the rest. Aunt Shura was the last to go, and my grandmother could not do so much as pour a cup of tea on her own, so my sister and Mama and I folded her clothes and stuffed what we could into three velvet suitcases that Papa hauled out of her palatial apartment. She arrived in the winter of 1940, which then seemed to be a time of extreme privation because Papa had to sneak home a bag of clementines from the Industrial Engineering Institute’s New Year’s party so we could have a small celebration of our own.